


Calling on Dryads

by Rosie_Rues



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-19
Updated: 2011-08-19
Packaged: 2017-10-22 19:40:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 910
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/241809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rosie_Rues/pseuds/Rosie_Rues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone has to write a Susan story, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calling on Dryads

After the fourth funeral (Edmund, for they had started with the youngest), Susan slipped away from her Aunt Alberta and made her way into the woods beyond the church. It was quiet here, and she could drop her veiled hat behind her and stumble into the swaying shadows of the trees.

The light slanted down, slow and golden, and she could almost see faces in the peeling bark, swaying arms in the movement of the wide leaves.

She kicked off her shoes, and pushed further in, sliding under low branches and ignoring the trace and sting of brambles laddering her stockings and scratching her legs.

There was a clearing in the middle of the wood, where the trees bent over a small blue pool, as if laughing at their own reflections.

Susan wrapped her hand around the wrist-thick branch of a birch and said, voice steady, “Dryads!”

The trees swayed, and the wind rushed over her, lifting strands of hair away from her face.

Here, where she could still hear the putter of cars from the village, they would be bound deep in sleep.

“Dryads!” she said again, with all the authority she can summon. _Once a king or queen in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia._ “Dryads!”

Nothing but the wind and the green scent of the trees.

She sank to her knees, still clutching the branch, and screamed, “ _Aslan!_ I’m _sorry!_ ”

No lion came pacing from between the oaks, wise eyes sorrowful.

She knew the lesson she was supposed to have learnt. She should go back to the church and sit through the next service (Oh, _Peter_ ) and the next, and then tomorrow’s because she had had a large family, once upon a time in another country, and they wouldn’t all fit into one day.

But, if she was honest with herself, she remembered Aslan’s country. There were no grey stones there, no tall candles or tapestry cassocks or dolorous voices intoning the old words of the funeral service. Aslan’s country is _green_.

They had talked about it once, of a golden evening in Cair Paravel. _Let us go out like Vikings,_ Edmund had said, _burning on the tide._

The others had acclaimed the idea, but she had said, ever sensible, _You would return again, when the tide turned._

 _No,_ Lucy had said, laughing. _How could we, when Aslan was waiting for us at the voyage’s end?_

Aunt Alberta might have agreed to that idea, if either of them had been able to talk about it. Everything between them has been stiff and formal, though. The Scrubbs had lost a son they no longer understood, and were taking in an adult daughter they never wanted. It was good of them, though they’d always been devoted to good causes (rather than kind deeds).

She had saved a few things, though: a few strands of hair from Lucy’s comb, a flannel of Edmund’s, which had still been lying damply by the sink when she finally came home after that endless, awful day, Peter’s cufflinks. She would buy a model boat, a sailing ship, high-prowed, and take them down to the coast, some wild place far from the crowds. She would stow the little things aboard and send it out. Archery was approved of at school, and she can still hit a target from a hundred paces. She thought she still had the nerve to fire a burning arrow, too, though it had been far longer since she’d done that.

She was still alone. Slowly, she pulled herself to her feet, leaning on the tree. She thanked it, without thinking, and was halfway across the clearing before she remembered that she hadn’t done that for years.

The pool was shallow, leaves coating its bottom. She remembered the story of the lake that turned everything to gold and dipped her fingers in, just in case. It would have been a reminder.

They remained flesh, suddenly cold, and she stared at her own reflection, rippling and pale. She looked as old as she felt, twice grown to adulthood.

She could go to London, and search for a garden where a tree once stood, a tree that became a wardrobe. If she found the rings, she could go to the wood between the worlds and seek her way back to Narnia, across as many worlds as there were to visit.

She knew already that she would not find that path.

 _Narnia exists as long as we believe in it!_ Lucy had shouted at her once. _It’s real, real, real!_

Now everyone who believed was dead, and she, who alone remained, didn’t believe enough. Even that had been taken from her and she knew that, just as she wouldn’t find Aslan’s country in a church, she would never find Narnia on earth.

Aslan still hadn’t come.

Slowly, she withdrew her hand from the water, and looked up at the sky between the trees. There were stars beyond that blue sky, but they were mere burning balls of gas. They were not delicate, sad-eyed men, scattered across the oceans of imagination. The trees only danced if the wind blew over them, simple physics. Lions were only beasts, confined in zoos, or killers on the plain.

“Fuck you,” she said clearly, and gasped. She’d never said the word before, and it tasted bloody and bitter in her mouth. “Fuck you, Aslan.”

Around her the trees moved, slow and graceful, against the direction of the wind.


End file.
